Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Machine Alignment Monday 3/13/23 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer (see also Katja Grace and Will Eden's related cases) The average online debate about AI pits someone who thinks the risk is zero, versus someone who thinks it's any other number. I agree these are the most important debates to have for now. But within the community of concerned people, numbers v...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march-2023 [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read t...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way I. Someone asks: why is "Jap" a slur? It's the natural shortening of "Japanese person", just as "Brit" is the natural shortening of "British person". Nobody says "Brit" is a slur. Why should "Jap" be? My understanding: originally it wasn't a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form ("Japanese person") in dry for...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/issue-two-of-asterisk …the new-ish rationalist / effective altruist magazine, is up here . It's the food issue. I'm not in this one - my unsuitability to have food-related opinions is second only to @eigenrobot's - but some of my friends are. Articles include: The Virtue Of Wonder: Ozy (my ex, blogs at Thing of Things ) reviews Martha Nussbaum's Justice For An...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kelly-bets-on-civilization Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development: Here's an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I've never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-update Impact markets are a charity analogy to private equity. Instead of prospectively giving grants to projects they hope will work, charitable foundations retrospectively give grants to projects that did work. Investors fund those projects prospectively, then recover their money through the grants. This offloads the responsibility...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations There's a good debate about this on the subreddit ; see also Robin Hanson and Samo Burja . You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories: Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge Civilizations about as advanced as Pharaonic Egypt Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain The de...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/openais-planning-for-agi-and-beyond Planning For AGI And Beyond Imagine ExxonMobil releases a statement on climate change. It's a great statement! They talk about how preventing climate change is their core value. They say that they've talked to all the world's top environmental activists at length, listened to what they had to say, and plan to follow exactly...

Plus: A case for culture-bound mental disorder skepticism https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-geography [Original post: The Geography Of Madness ] Thomas Reilly (author of Rational Psychiatry ) writes : I don't think Bouffée délirante is a culture bound syndrome - it's just the French equivalent of brief psychotic disorder (DSM), acute and transient psychotic diso...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/announcing-forecasting-impact-mini I still dream of running an ACX Grants round using impact certificates, but I want to run a lower-stakes test of the technology first. In conjunction with the Manifold Markets team, we're announcing the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants, a $20,000 grants round for forecasting projects. As a refresher, here's a short explainer ab...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness Around the wide world, all cultures share a few key features. Anthropologists debate the precise extent, but the basics are always there. Language. Tools. Marriage. Family. Ritual. Music. And penis-stealing witches. Nobody knows when the penis-stealing witches began their malign activities. Babylonian texts include sa-zi-ga...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2018-predictions-for-2023 To celebrate the fifth anniversary of my old blog, in 2018, I made some predictions about what the next five years would be like . This was a different experience than my other predictions. Predicting five years out doesn't feel five times harder than predicting one year out. It feels fifty times harder. Not a lot of genuin...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than   Is Sperm Count Declining? People say it is. Levine et al 2017 looks at 185 studies of 42935 men between 1973 and 2011, and concludes that average sperm count declined from 99 million sperm/ml at the beginning of the period to 47 million today. Levine et al 2022 expands the previous analysis to 223 studies and 57,168 men,...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism [apologies for an issue encountered when sending out this post; some of you may have gotten it twice] Thanks to Chris Kavanagh, who wrote an extremely kind and reasonable comment in response to my Contra Kavanagh on Fideism and made me feel bad for yelling at him. I'm sorry for my tone, even though I'm never going to get a proper beef a...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism   I. I've been looking into the world of YouTube streamers; if you want to make it big, you need to have a beef with some other online celebrity. Fine; I choose Chris Kavanagh, who tweeted about me recently:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ro-mantic-monday-21323 In honor of Valentine's Day, this installment of Mantic Monday will focus on attempted clever engineering solutions to romance. We'll start with the usual prediction markets, then move on to other types of algorithmic and financial schemes. Normal content will resume next time around.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february-2023 [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you rea...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd The long road to Moscow The " wisdom of crowds " hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess. Ask one person to guess how much a cow weighs, and they'll be off by some amount. Ask a hundred people and take the average of their answers, and you'll be off by less. I was intrigued by a claim in...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mostly-skeptical-thoughts-on-the People worry about chatbot propaganda. The simplest concern is that you could make chatbots write disinformation at scale . This has created a cottage industry of AI Trust And Safety people making sure their chatbot will never write arguments against COVID vaccines under any circumstances, and a secondary industry of journalist...

Basically the same as 2022 - this is just a reminder to start working on entries https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2023 Sure, this seemed to go well last the last few times, let's do it again. Write a review of a book. Any book you like - most past winners have been nonfiction, but maybe you can change that! There's no official word count requirement, but previous fin...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/response-to-alexandros-contra-me I. In November 2021, I posted Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know , where I tried to wade through the controversy on potential-COVID-drug ivermectin. Most studies of ivermectin to that point had found significant positive effects, sometimes very strong effects, but a few very big and well-regarded studies were negativ...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1302023 One million Metaculi, fake stocks, scandal markets again Happy One Millionth Prediction, Metaculus Metaculus celebrated its one millionth user forecast with a hackathon , a series of talks , and a party: This was a helpful reminder that Metaculus is a real organization, not just a site I go to sometimes to check the probabilities of thing...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators This post isn't exactly about AI. But the first three parts will be kind of technical AI stuff, so bear with me. I. The Maskless Shoggoth On The Left Janus writes about Simulators . In the early 2000s, the early AI alignment pioneers - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, etc - deliberately started the field in the absence of AIs worth aligning. A...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains sentences that would look bad taken out of context. In the past, I've said "PLEASE DON'T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT" before or after these, but in the New York Times' 2021 article on me, they just quoted the individual sentence out of context without quoting the "PLEASE DON'T TAKE THIS OUT OF CO...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-predicted-2022 Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contest Last year saw surging inflation, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a surprise victory for Democrats in the US Senate. Pundits, politicians, and economists were caught flat-footed by these developments. Did anyone get them right? In a very technical sense, the single person who predic...